Covid, Riots, and Escapist Fiction

I’ve been thinking lately about the escapist nature of reading fiction. As a writer who specializes in urban fantasy, I’m more or less in the business of escapist fiction. It’s what I spend my free time working on. Then, I go onto social media or turn on the news. We’re surrounded right now by hugely important events for the global community and American society. 

I can’t imagine there are many people who are unaffected in some way by the Covid-19 pandemic. We live and will continue to live with the economic, social, and medical fallout from the pandemic for the foreseeable future. At least one estimate puts the potential global financial cost at over $4 trillion. That number is so big that I can’t attach any meaning to it. They might as well say four infinities of cash have evaporated or the pandemic set fire to a Grand Canyon of money. If they put it that way, I’d at least know that I’m not supposed to have any real, objective understanding of what it means. We don’t possess the means to quantify the emotional costs attached to all of the deaths or the psychological toll of extended isolation. 

In the US, we’re seeing the fallout from the death of George Floyd. Except, we’re not. George Floyd’s death at the hands of police officers is just the latest in a long line of well-documented abuses and crimes committed against the African-American community at large. That story begins over 400 years ago with slavery. You can trace it forward from there through: the Black Codes and Jim Crow laws; poll taxes; grandfather clauses; lynchings; the Atlanta Race Riot; the Greenwood Massacre; redlining; segregation; the Tuskegee syphilis experiment; the Emmett Till murder; the assassinations of Medgar Evers, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Malcolm X; black churches being bombed or burned with awful regularity post-1950; anti-miscegenation laws; systematic denial of loans to black farmers by the Department of Agriculture; racial profiling; disproportionate incarceration; racial pay gaps; as well as the killings of Trayvon Martin, Eric Garner, Michael Brown, Laquan McDonald, Freddie Gray, Ahmaud Arbery, David McAtee, and  Breonna Taylor . This is the tiniest glimpse of a very large and profoundly ugly pattern of systemic discrimination. The protests and riots are about George Floyd, but they’re also about those four centuries of abuse. 

This isn’t meant to excuse the kind of rioting that devastated the Lake Street and Hiawatha Ave. area in Minneapolis. That violence was carried out at least partially by people who were opportunistic rioters from out of the area. All of the rioters committed crimes and should be prosecuted. Yet, much like the projected $4 trillion cost of the pandemic, the sheer volume of loss along Lake and Hiawatha can make it hard to wrap your brain around. So, let me make it a little more accessible for you. 

Don Blyly is the owner of a pair of bookstores called Uncle Hugo’s and Uncle Edgar’s, respectively named after a science fiction award and mystery genre award. You can guess what kind of bookstores he ran. He has spent the last 46 years building and maintaining those stores near Lake Street. A feat made more remarkable by the fact that he shepherded those stores through an era marked by the demises of major retail booksellers and thousands of independent bookstores. At least, he did until someone burned his stores down during the riots. When people talk about someone watching their life’s work destroyed, this is what they’re talking about. 

It would be very easy to blame the protesters for this event and leave it at that. I did at first. The wanton destruction of a bookstore is the kind of thing that makes me very unsympathetic to a cause. Once you start burning books, there is a very good chance I’ve become your enemy for life. I suspect the same is true for most writers. I’ve had a little time to think about it, though, and I realized something. Don Blyly is also a victim of the systemic discrimination the protests were about. Without that pattern of racism and discrimination, there likely would have been no protests. Without the protests, there would have been no context for the rioters to take advantage of to set the fire. This kind of hypothesizing isn’t 100% guaranteed accurate, but I doubt it’s much of stretch in this case. 

The blind eye American politics and white culture has turned on individual and systemic racism created this situation. Our willful dismissal of true claims that the system was rigged stoked the fire beneath a cauldron of barely repressed pain and injury. African-Americans have not imagined slights where none exist. Police do target them. Store owners, employees, and store security often treat every African-American customer as a potential criminal. Sometimes, it’s subtler. Employers do deny them jobs based on race, but have gotten savvy enough to dress it up in some other excuse. You can read account after account of African-Americans getting ignored by clerks or by wait staff. You can read accounts of white customers avoiding African-American staff. Our collective unwillingness to acknowledge and remedy these and so many other related problems made events like the Minneapolis riots not only possible, but predictable. We’ve had a very long time as a culture and nation to do better, to develop empathy, and we have failed pretty miserably to do so. 

So, what does all of this have to do with escapist reading? I’ll admit that I’ve felt a little like I was indulging in a selfish hobby by writing escapist fiction when more pressing matters were happening all around me. Couldn’t I be doing something more meaningful with my time? Yet, when I look back, I realized that escapist reading might be more relevant than I thought. 

I grew up in less than ideal circumstances. I was what is probably best described as a kid who was too smart for his own good. I had very strained relationships with my parents. I was so awful to my siblings that we all had to become adults before we could even start to repair those relationships. My interactions with most of my peers happened on a scale ranging from bad to awful. In fact, many of those peer interactions were so bad that I’ve actively avoided almost all of those people since graduation. My life, then, was generally one awful day followed by another, although the root causes for that awfulness could vary a lot. 

In the middle of that persistent awfulness, sort of like a time filled by a pandemic and nationwide protests/riots, the one thing I had to lean on was reading. For a few merciful hours, I could escape into a fictional world where none of my problems were present. Or, they weren’t present in a way that I immediately recognized. It was a release valve for a lot of pent-up aggression and pain. I could see villains vanquished by the sword of Conan or the piercing intellect of a detective residing at 221B Baker Street. I could vent my spleen vicariously through the outraged writings of Harlan Ellison or live in the nostalgic glow of a Ray Bradbury short story. These were my friends, my champions, and my shield against a world that often confounded and hurt me for reasons that remained opaque until well into adulthood. 

Of course, there were other benefits to all that reading. We now know that reading fiction can actually help you develop empathy by teaching you to see the world through another’s perspective. While I still struggle with empathy, I credit a lot of what empathy I do possess to those years of fervent escapist reading. I developed a lifelong love of the written word, which has furnished me a livelihood and expanded on my education. While I don’t consume books at the frenetic pace I did as a teen, I still do a fair bit of reading to learn and, yes, engage in some escapism. In this time of never-ending bad news and social strife, I also realize that escapist reading has a valuable mental health function. It lets a person briefly disconnect from all the darkness and maybe find a few moments of uncomplicated happiness. While we may have a responsibility to pay attention to the world and its woes, we’ll all serve it better by giving our minds and emotions a break from it now and then. If I can help someone do that with one of my books or short stories, I think that’s something worthwhile.